Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour

2025-07-06
I paid $10 for a burrito once and it gave me diarrhea. Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour also cost me $10 but did not give me diarrhea--yet. Talking about the cost of a game is boring and pointless to me, that's what those first two sentences try to convey. I'm hungover so you'll have to excuse my lack of wit.

Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour is also a game that for the most part lacks wit. It's offers a wealth of information about how rumble works, and how little bits of plastic were made in precise ways to perform specific functions you'd never think of, and how screens and speakers and cameras work--but for all its effusive knowledge it never really surprises you. It's one of the most by-the-book Nintendo games I've ever played. "Book" is apt because half the game is reading the aforementioned info-dumps and taking quizzes, one quarter is kind of tediously exploring the (admittedly cool) 3D rendering of the Switch 2 and it's accessories to find hidden "stamps", and the last quarter is actual minigames.

The minigames themselves are fun enough and do a great job of demoing the features of the console. What a sterile fucking sentence to use to describe a Nintendo game. "Fun enough?" "Do a great job demoing the features of the console?" I'm currently playing WarioWare: Twisted! and that is Nintendo tripping over itself with insane and fun ideas. And as much as I low-key love Speed Golf, Quick Click, and the one where you have to guess the specific shapes based on only feeling its outline via rumble, Welcome Tour doesn't have a single game approaching the whimsy or delight of rotating a vibrating GBA in your hands to line up a mohawk on a woman's head. If this was anyone but Nintendo that'd be an utterly unfair comparison but it is Nintendo and I think perfectly fair to say there should have been something a bit more charming on display here.

But hey, at the end of the day fucking around with the new mouse controls is pretty dope. I already trotted it out at a party and had friends try and beat each other's records at various minigames, to medium fanfare. Plus throw in nerding out about all the mechanical engineering wizardry that goes into producing a console like this and, you know what, I think I got my $10's worth.

Excuse me, I think I have diarrhea.